Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2020

[Shepherd]

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System: The following 6 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4978307.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 6:54 pm on Feb 1, 2020 (utc -5)

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FWIW, seeing the featured snippet holder (wikipedia in this case) gone completely from the SERPs this morning, no longer listed on page 2 or anywhere.

[RedBar]

Can anyone confirm if the update has settled down ?

I can confirm that yesterday's update(s) have finished, today's have started and will go on for a few more hours and tomorrow's will start just after today's have finished ... Sunday's will start on Sunday followed by Monday's!

This is the reality of G updates, they are continually on-going and happening all the time.

Which bit of this do people NOT comprehend?

Stop stressing, relax and get on with improving your sites.

[ichthyous]

For instance someone posted their 10 year old site had been hit, it's very unusual for G to hit anything in a big way unless they are having a purge or an attempted clean-up of something.

Not true RedBar, my domain is 17 years old and Google has hit me hard a couple of times over the years. I don't buy links, and I don't play any funny games with my site. Never once did I have penalty notice. In September of 2018 my site went off a cliff and has never recovered the same levels traffic again. The maximum drop I've had has been around 35-40% depending on the landing page but it's becoming impossible to ever get that traffic back no matter what you do. Add on top of that the fact that Google is loading so many more ads, articles, carousels, etc on each page that the result is just a much diminished amount of traffic. The 2011 redesign of image search also hurt image based sites hard...my image traffic dropped 90% overnight and never came back again.

[SteveWrz]

Not true RedBar, my domain is 17 years old and Google has hit me hard a couple of times over the years. I don't buy links, and I don't play any funny games with my site. Never once did I have penalty notice.

Same here. 13 year old site. Always followed Google's guidelines and never ventured into anything even remotely grey hat. I've spent years writing quality content and believing the mantra that "content is king" and now my site is in the worse shape it's ever been. Buying ads will not help me either.

[sk7411]

@RedBar : Stop stressing, relax and get on with improving your sites

Thanks for your advice however I Wish it was really this easy my Friend!

[edited by: sk7411 at 3:44 pm (utc) on Feb 14, 2020]

[southernguy]

I have seen so many people here which at one point claimed that improving their site increased rankings, only to come back months later complaining that their site tanked. Expired domains (with strong link profiles) are what rank now, they rank quickly and tank after a few months but its the only garbage Google seems to be ranking right now.

[Hollywood]

Agree.

[Jez123]

Expired domains

#*$! hard to find any these days that aren't spammed into oblivion.

[RedBar]

All of you who think you have been unfairly hit, I wrote:

it's very unusual for G to hit anything in a big way unless they are having a purge or an attempted clean-up of something.

Note "unusual", there is usually a reason. About 15 years or so ago it took myself and Tedster a couple of months to work out why one of my sites had been hit big time ... we eventually worked it out and rankings returned once the site had been rectified.

Everyone who knows me knows I am not defending Google however there is usually a reason for a hit but occasionally they get it wrong and when they do you have to find a way out of the mire into which they've dropped you.

my image traffic dropped 90% overnight and never came back again.

I lost 95% and that was the day my dummy was spat out with Google, I've never listened to anything they've said or recommended ever again, they only tell you to do things that benefit them, not you, you simply have to learn to work smarter than them, it's not easy however it is possble.

[JesterMagic]

@ichthyous - My site has the same pattern as you and my domain is 17 years old as well. No funny games and hit a couple of times hard through out the years. The only difference in my story is image search is not an important part of our site.

As you said part of the problem is all the ads and widgets Google now shows but our other problem is Google giving less love to niche sites. Big media website posts about our niche started to rise about 2 years ago and have taken over (even when their content is not as good). I believe Google did this in part to appease these sites for loss of traffic they experienced in other areas.

[christianz]

Similar situation as mentioned above. Niche site, 14 years old and not getting much love from Google, which is, no doubt, trying to eradicate independent/small publishers and cater to big ones. We see this everywhere in the modern information space. You can argue that World Wide Web doesn't even exist anymore. We just have 5-10 websites that people sheepishly visit and what's left over is crumbs.

[Athedian]

@UpdatePains: It's just so annoying to see competitors doing something that's completely opposite of what Google's saying and still get rewarded (maybe link scheming is the way to go?). That, plus the fact Google spammed the SERP with ads + snippets + knowledge widget etc., it makes the entire organic result that much more difficult to see.

And we ended up having to pay for the Google Ads to get any kind of decent traffic and conversions to our site, but that's not really sustainable for a business. For the past few months, I've been fixing up our blogs and ended up losing more keywords than before with each iteration of Google Update. So I ended up telling my boss to screw it and redo the entire site.

(And I've been noticing that it's getting harder and harder to find the results that I want in Google; ended up going to places like DDG)

@RedBar: While there's merit to that, you can't fix what you can't control. At this point, the GSC is showing that all of my verification for URL fixes for my site have not been recrawled or fixed for the past 2 months. The pages were fixed, the links were fixed, sitemap resubmitted, did temporary URL removal, and so far, GCS has been stuck there for months.

Validation started
Started: 12/12/19 <- Like, seriously!?

So at this point, I'd have to say: Google's screwing me up big time, so yes, it's unfair for me and for the company. I want to fix the problems that they have detected but they are not letting me fix the problems.

[MayankParmar]

Traffic dropped on February 12, not yet recovered :(

[UpdatePains]

@Athedian :
We tried Gooble ads as few years back now. over 9 months we made only what we spent, considering the extra costs involved in management of the ad account it was just a waste of money. There is no growth there, just sustenance.
The big players in my industry now run G ads, I suspect because G has skewed the playing field so heavily to backlink spammers and their own ecosystem that the loss of organic conversions are hitting them harder than they can handle. Content is not king, far from it.
In recent months, I have played with different methods used by my competitors. I managed to rank a page (pos 19), in a competitive keyword (various iterations) previously not indexed, with 3 anchor text rich blog comment backlinks. No other changes to the page, internal linking or otherwise. This page has existed for over 5 years, no ranking. If that's not a broken system working against their own 'best practices' I don't know what is.

[seomotionz]

Google doesn't care about how old your domain is. Or, they doesn't even know (or care) if you have been consistently receiving traffic from them or not.

[TeresaD]

I am so confused, this is 1 weeks stats

Visitors viewed your products
€16 019 total worth of products viewed

My products are low value that is a lot of views!

Only 5 abandoned carts in days, I have checked and double checked on different phones, laptops, ip's and nothing wrong with the cart or the website,

If I am only being sent window shoppers why are non of them converting in the last 3 days?

And the adwords app is telling porkies by doubling the conversions, if I only have 1 a day and it says 2 then it is lying and has been for the last 2 weeks.

Google will you get it together, if my customers are looking at that many products I have a good user friendly website but your updates are trashing my sales.

[w_hebb]

Agree with most of the recent posts, traffic just keeps dropping, very much like the week of Picard. As to Ads, Amazon's ads simply dominate the page for most of my keywords, most of the Ads are often fraudulent claiming Free Shipping with Prime, but none of the products on Amazon related to the keyword are eligible for Prime. Complained for years, nothing happened. So now I have Amazon totally dominating the SERPS, dominating the Ads, it has gone from bad to ludicrous. Picard cost us a week of revenue, Picard Redo or whatever is going on, seems to be following the same pattern.

FWIW i have been following this board for years, lost my login and had to start a new account.

[mosxu]

@TeressaD

“My products are low value that is a lot of views”

Oh yes views and traffic are easy to produce try to complain to your local authorities.

[sk7411]

Weekend down by another 10% just when we thought a possible reversal might have happened and it all started around Feb 14th . I think gooble engineers could have spared that day easily for the sake of love may be ?

[glakes]

So now I have Amazon totally dominating the SERPS, dominating the Ads, it has gone from bad to ludicrous.

Which is why search engines these days only capture around 1/3 of first time product searches. Google has trained shoppers to go directly to Amazon first, and that's why Amazon gets over 50% of first time product searches. And Amazon's growth in first time product searches continues to grow substantially each year. Google's short term strategy, to crowd the SERPS with Amazon paid/organic listings above the fold to force others to pay for ads, comes at a cost. Google's relevance in ecommerce continues to fade, yet Google continues to embrace a failed strategy that limits the choice consumers demand.

Long story short, sell your products on Amazon if you can. I made the choice years ago when Google wouldn't rank our products above Amazon category pages that didn't even have the product keywords on them. Thus far my decision to sell on Amazon has been nothing but positive in terms of profitability. But Amazon is no different than Google. Amazon's marketplace is heavily rigged toward generating the most profit for Amazon which at times conflicts with what is best for the consumer.

Google's "Shopping Actions" initially appear to be nothing more than optional filler for AI to consider. If displaying PPC ads are more profitable for Google, Shopping Actions ads will not display. As I do more testing, and have more time under my belt, I'll be able to weigh in further.

When all things are considered, the future of independent ecommerce sites does not look to good for those trying to capture sales from new users. Ecommerce is largely dominated by Amazon and Google with both squeezing as much profit out of any transaction as they can. My strategy includes a focus on trying to get repeat customers to purchase on our website where costs are lower - 3% transaction fee -vs- Google's Shopping Actions fee of 12% and Amazon's 15% fee.

[RedBar]

Which is why search engines these days only capture around 1/3 of first time product searches.

Is there a source for this statistic?

Just wondering how it can be proven?

Ecommerce is largely dominated by Amazon and Google

By this you mean retail / B2C ecommerce?

[glakes]

Is there a source for this statistic?

There's lot of stats out there, with some being more credible than others. I've posted about them in the past, and they all present a dim future for search engines. Just a quick search found this 2016 State of Amazon report.

See: [go.bloomreach.com...]

Amazon has grown its lead as the place where consumers first search for products. Now, 55 percent of consumers begin their search on Amazon when shopping for products online.

[EditorialGuy]

There's lot of stats out there, with some being more credible than others. I've posted about them in the past, and they all present a dim future for search engines.

Just think--a future where nobody worries about Google rankings and updates. :-)

[sk7411]

Just think--a future where nobody worries about Google rankings and updates. :-)

Is this SEO Therapy ,Sign me up plzzz!, i already feel tranquillised reading those lines .

[universenet]

[cnbc.com ]
Total control
Hello Pyongyang, how is going?
ok maybe this is just Madurai, India effect

[Athedian]

@UpdatePains: It's insane to see that big G is allowing this. Today just saw one of the competitors getting a massive boost in ranking again. 2.4 million+ ranking boost in less than 3 weeks according to Ahref. I checked their backlinks and their site, all link schemes left and right. Yet, Google loved it.

I'm gonna try to go for the same strategy soon and see how well that plays out. Although I have a hunch that for the short term, this is the way to go, probably after a while, Google decides to reverse everything and clamps down on this type of backlink strategy.

EDIT: After checking new backlinks of that particular competitor, there's a whole bunch of those backlinks to 404. Either the tool is capturing the stats incorrectly or Google is just ignoring everything they've said in the past.

[RedBar]

What are you guys talking about?

Darned if I know, for months / years I have seen changes every day, I don't bother taking any notice of them unless a specific sector is hit i.e. medic update.

[topaz]

Seems to be a lot harder to get some decent Discover traffic now.

[glakes]

My conversion rate/total unique transactions from organic Google traffic seems to be improving. My conversion rate is below.

2/8: .44%
2/9: .45%
2/10: 0%
2/11: .46%
2/12: 1.59%
2/13: 1.15%
2/14: .57%
2/15: .60%
2/16: 2.14%
2/17: 1.94%

[Robert Charlton]

Mods note: I've just removed a post that was claiming to see the future, predicting an update with no documentation or reasons to it, but making claims big enough and boastful enough that it created lots of curiosity... and in the proceess was derailing all useful discussion in this thread.

The poster has a questionable track record in this forum, and did nothing but waste a bunch of volunteer mods' time. To quote one reaction...

"why should chicken little be given a platform for attracting attention to himself?

Really, folks, volunteer mods don't enjoy editing. Again, please use Reported at first suggestion that something like this is going on. The "Report Message" funtion is hidden under the message number dropdown, to the left of the date and time and above the post.

To those who make such posts, I'd avoid both crystal balls and tea-leaves, unless you've can suggest some pretty strong reasons or patterns about why you're making these predictions. Thanks all, and my apologies to those whose posts were removed.

[Kendo]

there's a whole bunch of those backlinks to 404. Either the tool is capturing the stats incorrectly or Google is just ignoring everything they've said in the past.

Dunno how but I see backlinks in our list that were removed 10+ years ago... from sites of our own that we closed. Then I see others that disappear to reappear a couple of weeks later. So it's obviously nothing to lose sleep about.